1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to adaptive filtering. In particular, the invention relates to adaptive filtering with tap leakage.
2. Description of Related Art
Adaptive filters may be used in a number of applications such as adaptive equalization in digital communications systems. Adaptive filters are typically implemented as a non-recursive filter having N taps. For example, the adaptive filter may be a fractionally spaced equalizer having tap weights spaced a fraction of a symbol. The fractional spaced equalizer provides better performance than conventional symbol synchronous equalizers in the presence of severe linear distortion. The adaptive filter may have N equalizer coefficients that are updated or adjusted according to the input signal. The adaptive filter prevents the buildup of large coefficient values by systematically adjusting the magnitudes of all the equalizer tap weights or equalizer coefficients. However the systematic adjustment may cause output overflow, leading to substantially degraded performance.
A technique to solve this problem includes preventing the buildup of large coefficient values through systematically “leaking” or decreasing the magnitudes of the equalizer tap weights. This technique has a number of disadvantages. First, it requires an additional multiplication for each tap-update. The number of additional operations becomes significant for large number of taps. Second, adding tap-leakage computations to pre-existing hardware blocks may be difficult, considering the number and complexity of additional required operations.
Therefore, there is a need to have an efficient technique to reduce the computations of the adaptive filter with tap leakage.